The Forty under 40 Africa awards were held recently to honour the continent’s most influential and accomplished business leaders, under the age of 40, from a wider range of sectors.

Young people from 16 African countries were nominated with the most outstanding personalities taking home the ultimate prizes in their respective categories.  

Here is a summary profile of four Ghanaians who were decorated for excellence in their chosen professions. They are Rosebird Ama Dadzie (Theatre and Arts female category), Ronald Tagoe,(Science & Technology) Nelson Amo (Investment) and Dr. Kofi Amoa-Abban (Oil & Gas).

Rosebird Ama Dadzie

The realistic pencil artist started drawing at an early age and developed her talent further as her drawings were being complimented by teachers and classmates in school.

Later in life, she studied Painting and Decorating at Takoradi Technical University, and started building a portfolio as her passion for ‘hype-realistic figurative art’ grew and participated in many art and craft exhibition.

She began drawing African celebrities and sometimes spent weeks and months to produce art pieces with strong emotions to connect with her audience. She captures details of her artwork using charcoal, graphite, colour pencil and paint.

Describing her craft as rewarding, she says her artworks are made from “determination and love purposely to groom and educate people,” as she encourages young ladies especially to be self-reliant, have positive self-esteem, as well as gain confidence to face and overcome life’s challenges.

Ronald Tagoe

Ronald attended Presbyterian Boys Secondary School (PRESEC) and continued at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), where he studied Computer Science and graduated in 2013.

In 2021, he completed his Master’s programme in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Leicester (UK) and passed with distinction. While at KNUST, he co-founded mNotify, a telecommunications company (SMS and Voice Technologies) with the objective of improving information dissemination within corporate organisations and religious bodies.

The company, under his leadership over the past nine years, became one of the giants in the Communications cloud service space with its products spanning across SMS, Voice Technologies, and the USSD infrastructure. mNotify currently has over 20,000 clients across many industries and makes an average annual revenue of USD 350,000.

He is passionate about Artificial Intelligence and considers social commerce as the future of commerce in Africa. This passion led him to start Chatbots Africa to empower African Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) to increase their revenue and enhance their customer engagement using Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots (Conversational Commerce).

Chatbots Africa is currently registered in Ghana and in Kenya. Another application he developed is the Sario App, a music-oriented crowdfunding platform in Ghana which won the Lifestyle App Category at the 2018 MTN Apps Challenge.

Nelson Amo

Nelson is experienced in Business Development, Grant Management, Business Model Innovation, Growth Planning, and Project Management in the profit and non-profit sectors.

He is an alumnus of the Oxford Social Finance Programme from the Oxford University of Business School. He has a Master of Science (MSc) in Development Studies from London School of Economic (LSE) with special interest in Business Model Innovation.

In addition to other certificate courses in Finance, he is the Grant Manager/Programme Lead for ‘mLab Ghana’ a project under the Ministry of Communications with funding from the World Bank. The  programme aims to promote the development of digital start-ups, and support them to develop and launch their prototypes on the market.

Mr. Amo had previously designed and led enterprise support programmes such as the Innohub Accelerator Programme, Solidaridad West Africa’s Accelerator for Responsible Gold, fLab Incubator for females in tech, the British Council’s ReadyToWork incubator programme, among others.

He has led consulting projects across several industries including health, renewable energy, agribusiness, green housing.  He is a Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance Fellow and a Coach of the Africa Entrepreneurship Awards, hosted by the BMCE Bank of Africa in Morocco.

Dr. Kofi Amoa-Abban

Best known as the Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rigworld Group, he is an indigenous upstream Oil and Gas entrepreneur and a philanthropist.

The company has operations across West Africa and beyond, and has, over the years, proven its international acceptance as a top-quality service provider.

Dr. Amoa-Abban’s exemplary professional competencies have been pivotal in making local content and participation regulations feasible in the upstream oil and gas industry.

Some of his accomplishments as the CEO of Rigworld Group include securing long-term working relationships with global oil and gas giants like Maersk Drilling, Tullow oil, Modec, Eni, Score (Europe) Ltd.

He holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Ghana and a master’s degree from Oslo University, where his interest in the oil industry was piqued following the discovery of oil in Ghana in 2007.

Prior to establishing Rigworld, he had served as a drill crew member with Atwood Hunter and Banda Wells. His contribution and dedication to the oil and gas sector has earned him several awards, apart from the recent recognition at the Africa 40under40 awards.

By Spectator Reporter